Not all museum projects are part of a long-term plan. Some come about by chance and it was through a stroke of good luck that I was at World Museum when the Ghanaian artist and curator Atta Kwami paid a visit to the African displays in our World Cultures gallery a few months ago. On that occasion I was able to meet Atta over a coffee in the museum café to discuss his current work.

Atta kindly agreed to exhibit some of his work in the World Cultures gallery later in the year and I invited him to do some preparatory sketches for the project at the museum stores. Atta jumped at the chance of getting behind the scenes and ended up spending three days sketching at the museum store with his wife Pamela Clarkson, who is also an artist.

Atta was inspired to make working drawings of objects from many different regions of the African continent during his three days of sketching. The items he chose to make studies of included, brass gold weights and ceramic vessels from Ghana, silver jewellery from the Sahara, East African beadwork, Nigerian ankle ornaments in brass, and carved wooden utensils from Central Africa.

Brass box lid donated to the museum by A. R. Chinnery in 1906. One of the Ghanaian objects sketched by Atta Kwami

Atta thinks of his drawings as visual exercises, a bit like a musician’s “finger exercises”, and as a form of visual note taking. The drawings he made at the museum store are a first step towards a series of prints he will make for an exhibit in the introductory area of the Africa section of the World Cultures gallery at World Museum. Atta is thinking of calling his series ‘Prints in Counterpoint’, because he sees his images as providing additional ways of seeing and understanding the African artefacts in the museum’s collection. Counterpoint is a musical term that refers to the simultaneous sound of two or more independent melodies added above or below a given musical phrase. Atta hopes that his finished prints will allow visitors intriguing new ways of seeing and appreciating the African objects in the museum’s collection.

Chrissy Partheni, Head of Museum Partnerships has been working in Ethnology to widen her curatorial skills. She has recently started to document a fascinating collection from northeastern India and here she gives us an insight into the objects she is working with:

“These heavy hair pins known as Hrokia, which are used by women, their smaller version, Sakia, used by men and the women’s costume belts are just a few of the many pieces donated to Liverpool Museum in 1965 by Ann Parry, the wife of Nevill Edward Parry. The gift comprising of 315 objects, included costumes, household objects, personal ornaments, weapons and musical instruments.

Nevill Edward Parry served as a Civil Servant in India. He was the Superintendent of the Lushai Hills, which is now in Mizoram, India between February 1924 and April 1928. He built his collection while there and later wrote a monograph on the Lakher people. He was particular interested in local customs and traditions and he called on Christian missionaries and colonial officials working in the area to preserve these skills as he thought this would likely mean that British rule could be more firmly established.

It has been fascinating to discover that many of the objects donated are described and even illustrated in Parry’s monograph: The Lakhers, London, 1931. We know for example the name of the hair pins and the fact that they were made of brass in the lost wax technique. We also know that the women use the pins to keep the hair in a knot loosely around the neck and that the overall hair look is meant to look untidy. The men’s hairpins were meant to keep the hair in a knot above the forehead with a white cloth called khutang wrapped around the knot. Lakher men are very proud of their hair and they would not cut them at all after the age of nine.

The metal belts in the photograph are called chongchi and are made of brass spiral pieces held together by string. The belts are worn by the women to hold the overskirt around their waist and to cover the part of their body that was left exposed between the short jacket and the skirt. Belts are also a sign of the wearer’s wealth and Parry tells us that: “the women take pride in their belts being polished but the polish would come as a result of the belts being rubbed against the women’s body as they walk.”

We hope to feature a full costume and more objects from this fascinating collection in future blogs.”

]]>Reconnecting with the ancestors at World Museumhttp://blog.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/2014/06/reconnecting-with-the-ancestors-at-world-museum/
http://blog.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/2014/06/reconnecting-with-the-ancestors-at-world-museum/#commentsMon, 30 Jun 2014 11:57:19 +0000http://blog.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/?p=5527

Patrice and Iva in World Cultures Gallery with a portrait of their grandfather and great grandfather.

As curator of the African collections at World Museum I often take groups of visitors round our World Cultures Gallery. I also take individuals and smaller groups, with special interests, behind the scenes to show them our stored collections. Many are students or scholars involved in special research projects, and although they often get excited about what they find in our collections, their interests are mostly intellectual and aesthetic. But recently I had a visit that was rather different because it was from cousins Patrice Wellesley Cole and Iva Johnson.

Their excitement at being able to see 21 items from Western Africa in our collection was because these were things that had been given to the museum by their late grandfather Claudius Dionysius Hotobah During and by their great grandfather, George Punshon During. Part of the cousins’ joy at seeing their ancestors’ donations preserved in the museum was because it showed them a side to their late grandfather which they had known nothing about. Both cousins expressed their pride in what her ancestors had given to the museum.

George Punshon During and Claudius Dionysius Hotobah-During in 1907

In an email Patrice sent me after her visit, she wrote:

“Reconnecting with the past through the artistic donations of our forbears was truly remarkable. We were struck by the durability and antiquity [of the works] … Our grandfather and great -grandfather had great foresight when they donated such an artistic legacy to Liverpool.”

And she added her thanks to the museum “for preserving them for future generations.”

Some of the donated items are on display in the museum’s World Cultures Gallery and they include household objects, as well as beautifully carved wooden figures and a helmet mask used in rituals of the Mende women’s Sande initiation society. A twenty-one year old Claudius Hotobah During brought eleven of the works to Liverpool in 1908, when he arrived in Britain from Sierra Leone to study law at Middle Temple in London. He donated others from Sierra Leone between 1906 and 1915 through a steamship engineer called Arnold Ridyard who visited West Africa with Elder, Dempster & Co.’s steamer service every three to four months until he retired in 1916. Ridyard may have put Claudius up at his home in Rock Ferry in 1908 and he also assisted his Sierra Leonean friend in other ways. In return Claudius contributed to Ridyard’s collecting operation for the museum in Liverpool.

I was delighted when Patrice contacted me to arrange her visit to see her grandfather’s donations. Her grandfather and great grandfather are among almost eighty West Africans known to have donated more than 500 objects to the World Museum through Arnold Ridyard, helping to make it one of the most important historical collections of African cultural artefacts in Britain. As I am in the process of writing up research on the West African donors to the World Museum African collection, I was thrilled to be able to meet Patrice and Iva, and to make another living, human connection to the history of the museum collection.

Fred, an Education Demonstrator at the International Slavery Museum, has written about one of the fascinating aspects of African history that you can find out about in the museum:

“As a slavery museum, we also learn about West Africa. European slave traders justified their mistreatment and exploitation of African people by painting a picture of Africa as a simple or “primitive” place compared to European civilisations. In reality, a series of powerful empires, with skilled craftsmen and complex societies existed in West Africa before and during the period of transatlantic slavery, including the once mighty Kingdom of Benin. We’ve added new objects to our Life in West Africa session to reflect this.

I really got interested in The Kingdom of Benin when I worked at the World Museum. On the World Cultures gallery we had a bronze sculpture of a queen mothers head, made as a memorial to her. I was amazed at the intricacy, detail and craftsmanship of the bronze cast.

The Kingdom was at its most powerful in the 15th century. A huge empire spread across much of modern South West Nigeria surrounding the capital city, Benin City, where a guild of craftsmen who made the queen mothers head would have been based. The city was protected by a network of walls and moats, some up to 18 metres high. To help children visual this, we tell them that means the walls would have been twice as high as the columns outside the museum in the Albert Dock!

Columns in the Albert Dock

The inner wall stretched for seven miles around the city, with a further 4,000 to 8,000 miles of earthworks and walls extending out into the surrounding countryside, protecting smaller villages and towns. It is thought that this is the biggest ever single human construction, even bigger than the Great Wall of China. It is evidence of what a well organised, structured society the kingdom had to have been, to be able to call on the engineers, architects and manpower to undertake this building work.

We use a replica of the bronze head that first raised my interest in the Benin Empire in our handling session to show the skill and attention to detail of the Benin craftsmen. Pupils try to guess who the statue is of, and why it might have been made. We also have a (plastic) replica of a carved elephant tusk. This is an example of how African societies told the history of their kingdoms, as they did not use a written language in this part of West Africa at this time.

Replicas of the broze sculpture and an ivory tusk, which are used in handling sessions for schools at the International Slavery Museum

The Benin Empire came to an end at the close of the 19th century. After several attempts by the British to force the Oba (king) to sign trade treaties, a party of British soldiers and traders were massacred as they tried to enter Benin City in order to remove the Oba from power. The British formed a “punitive expedition” in 1897 to destroy the city. The carved ivory tusks and bronze plaques and statues were looted and sold to collectors in Europe at auction, in order to pay off the loans taken out to fund the expedition.

Although the punitive expedition destroyed the Benin Kingdom of the 19th century, today an Oba does retain certain powers over this area of Nigeria. The guild of bronze-casters also still exists, using the same skills and techniques passed down for generations. This long tradition proves that the myths and prejudices of the European slave traders are as wrong now as they ever were.”

Irish type stone axe head (or ‘celt’) found in Parliament Fields, Toxteth Park, in 1866. This is probably the stone axe used to cure the Irish lad mentioned in the 1897 report.

World Museum is currently hosting the ‘Magic Worlds’ exhibition. It’s a fun and child-centred look at the miraculous, fantastical, illusional and folkloric – including everything from magicians to fairytales. The exhibition got me thinking about the role that ‘magic’ has played in the museum collection that I curate – the African collection. It’s true to say that there is a darker side to the long relationship that museums have had with all things ‘magical’.

The French philosopher J. P. Sartre considered the fantastic and the miraculous to have a history in religion and myth where it served to express mystical leaps into the spiritual realm. Christian societies in Europe have long defined themselves in relation to societies they found themselves in opposition to, which they characterised as ‘heathen’.

The spiritual beliefs and practices of ‘heathen’ societies were interpreted negatively in the context of Christian ideas about heresy, witchcraft and magic. In the 19th century, museums exhibited artefacts collected from different cultures and ‘races’ around the world in pseudo-scientific displays to illustrate their level of development and to rank them on a universal scale in relation to other cultures.

Christian European cultures were considered to be the most highly evolved, while ‘heathen’ African societies were classified as being among the least evolved. Museums applied misleading European terms, like ‘idol’ and ‘fetish’, to all sorts of African objects, from amulets to ancestral shrine figures, which they interpreted as representing the most ‘primitive’ and ‘irrational’ forms of religious practice.

The pseudo-scientific ranking of races and cultures on a universal scale was soon to be contradicted by the appearance of sophisticated cultural artefacts collected by European ethnographers from societies like the Kuba in the heart of central Africa.

This ranking also came into question because Europeans had cultural practices that could fall into these ‘primitive’ and ‘irrational’ categories as well.

I came across an interesting example of this in our museum archives, reported in the ‘Bulletin of the Liverpool Museums’, published in August 1897. Under the title ‘ ‘Medicine’ at the Museums’, the director of the then ‘Mayer Museum’ recorded the first known performance of magic at the museum:

“It may not be without interest, from a Folk-lore point of view, to place on record that but a few days ago, an Irish lad suffering badly from scrofulous sores, was brought to the Mayer Museum by his parents, who earnestly besought the authorities that they might be allowed to touch the child’s neck with an Irish Stone Celt, exhibited in one of the cases.

It was unavailing to try and persuade the deluded and superstitious couple, that no possible good could follow such an application. As their faith in the efficacy of the Stone could not be shaken, and they were loth to go away without being allowed to try this, in their belief, unfailing remedy, opposition was finally, and not without some hesitation, withdrawn, and the ancient implement placed in their hands.

After the operation the parents departed happy, grateful, and in the most perfect confidence that their child would be healed, and not without expression of surprise that so great a boon had been conferred on them without the fee, which they were prepared, and that very gladly, to pay.”

This May sees a new exhibition, ‘Telling Tales: the art of Indian Storytelling’, opening at World Museum, Liverpool. The exhibition will run from 24 May until 8 September 2013 and will feature artwork and scrolls by Indian artists who draw on both traditional Indian tales and contemporary issues in their art. Objects from NML’s own Indian collection will be displayed alongside the scrolls making for an interesting dialogue between old and new. The exhibition will also include a life size series of projections of Elena Catalano performing traditional Indian dancing.

I was lucky enough to go along to Toxteth TV last week to watch Elena being filmed for the projection by our exhibitions team. Elena was filmed on ‘greenscreen’ so she alone can be picked out and projected straight on to the walls of the exhibition.

Watching Elena put the finishing touches to her costume was fascinating. Particular emphasis is placed on the feet, the edges of which were painted red; Elena then wrapped bells around her ankles. This complemented the dance, where each movement and step travelled down to a flat, turned out foot.

Not only was the skill of the dancing mesmerising but also Elena’s ability to tell a story with her facial expression. This will fit wonderfully with the exhibition’s theme which proves that storytelling isn’t all about the written word!

Jacob Cook, as part of his work experience at NML, visits World Museum and reports on what he saw:

Today I revisited the World Museum in Liverpool for the first time in a while. I got there just after opening time expecting an empty museum, however that was not the case, the place was filled with junior school classes who must have been on their end of year trip.

These pupils seemed to enjoy every minute of the experience. They were excited, very curious about the exhibits and left no stone unturned (there are actual prehistoric stones that are available to handle) whilst dragging their teachers from one floor to the other. I thought it was great that their age group (8-11) are still as into the museum as me and my class were at that age.

One exhibit that I enjoyed was the Egyptian gallery, it’s not quite what I remembered but it’s just as (if not more) enjoyable. The well crafted design of the room was filled with everything from descriptions of the mythology of the time to mummified corpses. Once I left this area I was shocked at how long I spent inside. Another highlight was the Bug House. Not only was there giant insect models strategically placed in the design (including a giant spider which had one kid genuinely scared) but an abundance of specimens to get an up close look at (living or dead).

When it comes to this particular museum it’s difficult to pick a favourite aspect. It all comes together to create an experience, whether it’s the dinosaurs and the natural world, the ancient world or current world cultures, space and time, no matter how many visits it never bores. I’m sure they will be putting on new exhibits soon but even if you can’t make them or you miss them, I highly recommend the old exhibits; they got them right the first time.

]]>Reflecting on the Jubilee: West African Portrait Figures of Queen Victoriahttp://blog.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/2012/06/reflecting-on-the-jubilee-west-african-portrait-figures-of-queen-victoria/
Fri, 01 Jun 2012 12:52:07 +0000http://blog.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/ReflectingOnTheJubileeWestAfricanPortraitFiguresOfQueenVictoria.aspxDid you know that we have quite a few regal objects at World Museum? We started thinking about our royalty-related artefacts this week in the run up to the Diamond Jubilee celebrations and we thought we’d share a couple of them with you.

Here’s our Curator of African Collections, Zachary Kingdon to tell us more about them…

West African carving, donated by Mrs W. E. Johnson, 1908.

Jubilees may be occasions for celebration but they also invite reflection, so I have chosen to reflect on two carved wooden portrait figures of Queen Victoria from Nigeria in the World Museum’s African collection. At least twelve other similar figures can be found at other museums in Europe and America. I’ve been tracking them down over the last few months and I plan to publish something about them soon.

The figures would probably have been copied from photographs of Victoria distributed at the time of her Golden or Diamond Jubilees, which she celebrated in 1887 and 1897.

British colonial officers in West Africa during the late nineteenth century spared no effort to promote the idea of a benevolent British monarch. They made sure that images of Queen Victoria were displayed at her birthdays and jubilees, which were celebrated with public holidays, parades and festivals.

Under certain colonial administrators this led to the invention of a sort of ‘cult’ in which the British monarch was represented as an almost divine being. Such inventions were necessary in order to try and justify British rule through a shared ideology of Empire.

The first of these figures (top left) was donated to the museum in 1908 by Mrs W. E. Johnson, a Sierra Leonean Krio trader in Gambia. She had acquired it from the Yoruba town of Abeokuta in Nigeria, where she would have had commercial and family connections.

A great many Sierra Leonean Krio were descended from captive Yoruba who had been released at Freetown in the nineteenth century off illegal slave ships intercepted by British naval cruisers after abolition of the slave trade in 1807. After being educated by missionaries in Sierra Leone, some of them chose to return to their homeland, where they kept up their new-found Christian identity, wore European clothes and formed a prominent community in Abeokuta with their churches, schools and other institutions.

Unlike other West Africans, many Krio did not view the British

Donated by Arnold Ridyard, 1910.

Queen as their conqueror. In fact her popular name in Freetown was We Mammy, ‘Our Mother’. Given Mrs. Johnson’s background, I can understand why she might have had a figure of Queen Victoria carved for her in Abeokuta to show her loyalty and ‘civilized’ identity as a Krio.

But I find it curious that no similar portrait figures of King Edward VII, who succeeded Queen Victoria in 1901, can be found in museum collections? Perhaps that’s because Queen Victoria portrait figures like these were mainly owned by elite women like Mrs Johnson who gave them further, more personal, meanings.

]]>West African Donors to World Museumhttp://blog.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/2012/04/west-african-donors-to-world-museum/
Thu, 19 Apr 2012 13:52:38 +0000http://blog.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/WestAfricanDonorsToWorldMuseum.aspxDid you know that almost eighty Africans are known to have donated more than 500 objects to World Museum. Their donations helped to create one of the most important historical collections of African cultural artefacts in Britain.

A new display at World Museum shows photographic portraits of some of the West Africans who made donations to the museum between 1897 and 1916.

Most of them were taken by West African photographers. All the donors were friends or contacts of Arnold Ridyard, the steamship engineer who transported their gifts to Liverpool.

Ridyard was a prolific collector himself. He brought an astonishing total of 6,450 artefacts and natural history ‘specimens’ to the museum in Liverpool while serving as Chief Engineer with Elder Dempster & Company’s West African shipping service.

Little is known about some of Ridyard’s West African friends and collaborators so Zachary Kingdon, Curator of African Collections at World Museum, is helping to uncover their forgotten stories through his current research.

The picture below is of Nii Kojo Ababio IV, (formerly Amoako Atta) (1873 – 1938). Kojo Ababio IV was Mantse, or ‘king’, of the Alata Quarter of Accra’s James Town in the Gold Coast (now Ghana). He was an important figure in Accra’s politics during the colonial period. He donated ten Ga artefacts to the museum, four of which are on display in the World Cultures gallery in the museum on the third floor.

]]>Inspired by…http://blog.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/2011/06/inspired-by/
Mon, 27 Jun 2011 15:15:34 +0000http://blog.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/InspiredBy.aspxAre you an adult on a part-time art course or a member of a community art group? We are inviting you to put your creative talents to the test and create a piece of artwork inspired by the collections at Sudley House, World Museum and the Lady Lever Art Gallery.

Perhaps you could take inspiration from the internationally renowned Pre-Raphaelite collection at the Lady Lever Art Gallery, or the only art collection of a Victorian merchant in its original domestic setting at Sudley House, or maybe from objects in World Museum’s World Cultures gallery.

A panel of curators, educators and artists will judge. Winning artists and groups will see their work hung in an exhibition at World Museum and receive prizes. The closing date is 1 August 2011, and winners will be announced by the end of September.